The February issue of Rogue Cinema is now online!

February 1st, 2010   No Comments »

Hey folks, :)

Jeez it’s February already! Where does the time go? Anyway, here’s what we have for you in this month’s issue of Rogue Cinema.

Interviews:

Bianca Barnett
John Taylor
Keith Crocker

This Month’s Sleepover Girl:

Deneen Melody has graciously agreed to be our Valentine, and is making a special appearance as this month’s Sleepover Girl!

Articles:

We’ve all gone through slumps in our lives.  Sometimes, personal, sometimes professional.  It hits us all from time to time, and unfortunately, Naama Kates has been going through one herself.  In this fifth installment of her Journey of an Actress series, she talks about the downturn things have taken, how she’s been dealing with it, and about how sometimes, inspiration can come when you least expect it.

Sometimes some of the greatest artists are behind the camera. Such was the case with Nathan Juran, who brought us some of the best and well known classic b-movies ever made. Sadly, many people probably haven’t heard his name before as he was simply a director working behind the camera – an invisible face behind the magic. Well Philip Smolen wants us all to remember this great man for the relatively small but important role he played in cinematic history.

Fairy tales are as synonymous with childhood and this month Independent Filmmaker Jason S. Lockard shares a reworked/retelling of classic fairy tale from writer, director and star Jerry Lewis.

Josh Samford hasn’t done one of his crazy articles for a while now, so this month he thought he’d throw another one against the wall to see if it sticks. This time, Josh is talking about a movie that he thinks should be made. Milo & Otis – Paws of Vengeance. I ain’t even gonna try to describe that one. Just go read it. I dare ya!

Not to be outdone in the crazy department, Danny Runion has a whole new batch of movie mashups shooting out the top of the blender again this month. Now, go get a spatula so we can scrape ‘em off the ceiling and see what he’s on about this time.

Movie Reviews:

Bikini Frankenstein
Cannonball
Deadlands 2: Trapped
Demonia
From the Inside
Hero Tomorrow
Horrible
Hypochondriac
In the Realm of the Senses
Lo
Lost Souls
Night of the Creeps
President’s Day
ROT: Reunion of Terror
S.S. Experiment Love Camp
Sex and Zen
Skin and Bone
The Death of Hollywood
The Final Destination
The Furfangs
The Horror of Cornhole Cove
Torso
Twilight Vamps

Book Reviews:

Lonely Werewolf Girl

So head on over to Rogue Cinema (http://www.roguecinema.com) and check out all the goodness in this month’s issue.

Hope you all enjoy it!

  (Current Mood: tiredtired)

I will never buy another Digitech product!

January 25th, 2010   2 Comments »

So I’m checking out the Digitech forums tonight, and I find a post by a guy who’s basically been the backbone of the user community.  The guy’s name is Ross Johnson (Singtall).  He’s done lots of promo videos for their flagship product, the Digitech GSP-1101 and has been responsible for sending them lots of customers and helping to support the user community in the forums with his immense expertise, not only with the product, but as an experienced guitarist as well.  He’s made a huge number of great sounding presets for the user community as well, and all he wanted was an endorsement deal with Digitech.  He didn’t even want money, he would have settled for just having his name on the site in the artist section.  So what does he get for all his efforts?  This thread explains it all.  This thread was posted on the Digitech forums tonight.  It was deleted shortly thereafter, as was Ross’ account on the forums, but I reposted it in full in a new thread with a subject line telling them that they can screw over Ross, but this will not go away.  I will not see Digitech sweep this under the rug.  So here’s the thread in its entirety before it was deleted.  I’ll end my comments here by saying this.  Digitech has a sell it and forget it attitude and cares nothing for its customers or the people who help to promote their products.  So if you want good products with great customer support, look elsewhere.  Digitech doesn’t deserve your business if this is how they treat people.

Update: I woke up this morning to find out they had de-activated my account, but not deleted it.  I also saw that they have been busy cleaning out all the posts that related to this subject.  They’re choosing to continue to try to sweep it under the rug and not take responsibility for the way they’ve acted.  That’s fine.  I re-activated my account and made one final post on the matter, which I’m sure won’t be there long, so I’m adding it to this update.  The original thread is below.

You can deactivate my account, that’s fine.  I’ve already spread word about this though, and asked my other musician friends to spread word about it to.  See, they don’t even know Ross, but after I showed them the post about what you guys pulled on him, they were pissed about it too and they’re spreading the word to their friends about just what kind of a company you’re running.  You won’t stop me from spreading the word about this and you will lose future sales over it, guaranteed.  It all could have been avoided if you’d have just done the right thing in the first place, like any sane company would have done.  You instead chose to try to hide the evidence and sweep it under the carpet by making those who knew about this go away and deleting any related posts on the subject.  That’s fine, but there are consequences to behaving like that.

The 1101 is an overpriced toy put out by a company that back in the 2101 days was a great company.  Now…I wouldn’t walk across the street to spit on any of you.  I’m done with Digitech.  Cliff over at Fractal knows how to treat his customers, and he’s the one who’ll be getting my business.

See ya Digitech.  I’ll be looking at my 2101 longingly from now on, wondering what happened to the great company you used to be.

================

Update 2:

Ross and the guy at Digitech made up I guess and things are getting back to normal over there.  The guy from Digitech is actually trying to make an effort to be in the forums now to address people’s needs and concerns.  Hopefully there was a lesson learned here on Digitech’s part.   Still, it’s too little too late for me.  I’m done with them as a company.  This whole thing was ridiculous.  I’ve ordered myself an Axe-FX Ultra and I’ll be a happy Fractal Audio customer from now on.

==================
Original Forum Message:
==================

Author Message
singtall

member since: 02/12/2006
messages: 532

Subject: Extortion! 01/25/2010

I was accused of extortion by digitech rep Jason Lamb today. i emailed him to finish our long time talk about endorsement by digitech. in short, i told him i was tired of waiting on a call that hasn’t come in the last year. i worked on some pro HD videos for digitech after my phone conversations with Jason last year. i have tirelessly answered questions of the forums and via personal email for the last year. i made tons of patches and had my gsp1101 backup file available for all to download. when i finally said it’s time for digitech to at least mention my name on their website (not even pay me or give me anything else), Jason said “no. sorry, i have 100’s of emails from from people on youtube everyday that want endorsements. if i gave it to you, i would have to give it to everyone. i won’t be extorted into an endorsement”. wow, really? i’m still shocked. what a lie, there aren’t 100’s of videos of digitech garbage being posted everyday, much less endorsement requests.

i pulled my youtube videos and my website just a few minutes ago. i’m considering doing some “truth” videos to post on youtube, where i show the nasty harmonizer and fizzy cabinet sims. most of the reason i want to do this is not out of retribution, but out of anger because i caused so many people to buy the digitech stuff. i feel ashamed for being a digitech W H O R E for the last year.

before i do anything else, i wanted to post this to my friends and fellow christians on the forum and cool down. i will pray before i do anything else. i could use some Godly council from brothers right now.

thanks,

Ross

singtall

member since: 02/12/2006
messages: 532

Subject: Re: Extortion! 01/25/2010

from the looks of this email, i won’t be around anymore. bye guys.

Lamb, Jason to me, jason.lamb
show details 7:41 PM (2 minutes ago)
Rikk,

Read this thread and watch for any bad postings. We’ll pull him off if he gets out of control.

Jason
————————–
Sent using BlackBerry

singtall

member since: 02/12/2006
messages: 532

Subject: Re: Extortion! 01/25/2010

i got booted and somehow i’m back.

i’m not sure why Jason thinks i’m a threat. i’ve treated digitech like family for the last year. the only thing i did is pull my youtube videos and my gsp1101 website. it’s only fair. my stuff helped their sales for the last year and they couldn’t break down and publicly say thanks?

i won’t be used anymore. i’m finding out that companies like digitech play hardball. you live and learn i guess.

even though digitech has disowned me, i won’t stop helping everyone out. if you need me and i don’t respond (because they booted me), email me here:

rossjjohnson@gmail.com

despite the bad blood with digitech, it’s been a pleasure to be here and help so many great people.

sincerly,

Ross

Yondan

member since: 01/25/2010
messages: 1

Subject: Re: Extortion! 01/25/2010

Wow – Now how did this happen?
D.L.M.

member since: 02/27/2009
messages: 65

Subject: Re: Extortion! 01/25/2010

I’m selling my 1101 soon and getting an Axe-Fx Ultra. I’ll never EVER buy another Digitech product. This thing that happened to you Ross just put the nail in that coffin. It was bad enough with their crappy sell it and forget it attitude toward their products and their customers, but when you have this kind of crap going on as well, that’s just too much. I was willing to live with the other crap, but I will not support any company that acts like this toward anyone. Especially someone’s who’s supported them so wholeheartedly.

Nice job Digitech. You just lost at least two customers here. Wanna keep acting like this and try for more? I bet you got a whole lot of people here who are going to feel the same way and start telling everyone they know to not buy Digitech products.

If Digitech had ANY sense of decency at all, Jason Lamb would be fired and Digitech would issue an apology, not only to Ross, but to all of its formerly loyal users. Wanna bet that doesn’t happen?

Anyway, thank you Ross for everything you did for everyone. I’m close to getting the money for my Axe, and then the 1101 is out the friggin’ door.

mniel8195

member since: 01/03/2010
messages: 14

Subject: Re: Extortion! 01/25/2010

Sigtail is the reason why alot of us have purchased the gsp 1101, i know it had alot to do with my decision. To be honest though if had the cash i would purchase an axe fx ulta. I agree that a few things need to be done with the processor…better cab simulator, multi modulations at the same time, and what i think would be awesome would be mixing two or even three different amp sounds. i dunno if this is possible but i would like to see an honest attempt from digitech. I think digitech’s future is going to rely on their processors and simulation pedals because the rest of their pedals do not honestly stand up to the quality sound i think mxr has and a few other companies. I think a apology should be issued to sigtail fo sho! And i think some of the product developers should listen to what we in the product? We spend countless hours on this forum discussing every detail of the product, maybe digitech should do the same! If anyone deserves an recognition its sigtail. It would also be cool if digitech could give the user the option to scrap all of the factory presets so they could fit more amp simulators in, like a krank, rivera, and especially and engl preset, but that just me. peace out mofo’s
  (Current Mood: angryangry)

Holy crap I want an Axe-Fx Ultra! – Plus…more stuff I wanna ramble about.

January 25th, 2010   No Comments »

So I’ve been really jonesing lately to get an Axe-Fx Ultra guitar processor.  Yeah they’re two-grand, but holy crap they’re worth it.

I’ve been playing bass since like 1987, and I’ve been working on getting better at guitar.  I’ve also dabbled with drums and synth, but I’m not very good at either.  I can do the basics with those but that’s about it.  The problem is, I’ve never done anything musically other than the time we put a student band together to do a three song set at an outdoor show called Day on the Asphalt back in 1988 or so.  It’s been my unfortunate lot in life that I’ve never found anyone I could truly play music with.  I’ve been playing at home for my own pleasure and that’s it.  That will be changing when my friend Darwin moves back here from Arizona.  We’re going to start working on music and get a band together.  This has really inspired me to start wood shedding myself so to speak.  Basically, to sit and practice scale patterns, work on my finger speed and coordination (which is already really good, but you can always be better and faster), and to start playing around with different genres of music so I can incorporate different styles and feelings into what I play.  The long and the short of it is, I’m a good bass player.  Being honest with myself, I know I’ll never be an awesome bass player like a Geddy Lee or a Billy Sheehan, but I can be a great one, and that’s what I’m working for.

Oddly enough, musically, distraction has always been my worst enemy.  I don’t have the kind of a mind that can do ten things at once.  For example, I can’t really play and sing at the same time unless I’m playing something really simple.  I need to focus on what I’m playing, because any distractions will grab my focus and totally throw me off.  I have an overly active and attentive mind, so it tends to jump focus quite easily.  Concentration and really locking into what I’m doing is key for me.  I need to practice singing and playing at the same time to see if I can improve my ability to do that at all.  That’s something that’s actually has to do with a bridge that’s created between your left and right brain that develops as your brain develops.  Unfortunately, the earlier you start playing music, the better it develops, and I didn’t start playing until I was around 17.  By then it was pretty much too late.  I can improve my ability to do it I’m sure if I practice, but it’ll never be what it could have been had I started playing when I was younger.

Anyway, the Axe-Fx is like the ultimate guitar / bass processor.  It’s the first unit I’ve ever found that could truly replace my Digitech GSP-2101 that I got back in 1995 and still use to this day.  It’s just an absolutely amazing unit and sounds incredible.  I’ve been using my 2101 for 15 years now.  I’m sure I’ll be able to use the Axe-Fx for probably the rest of my playing life.  Now it’s just a matter of getting the money together to get one. :P

Ok, now on to other stuff…

Those Broadview Security commercials are totally racist and PC.  Why do I say that?  Because I’ve seen all of them.  Every one of them has a white guy (Not even a meth head or anything.  Just a normal looking white guy.) committing the crime.  Like there’s that many white guys committing crimes in fancy, high income neighborhoods.  They could stick a black guy or a hispanic guy in and mix them up, but oh no, we might offend someone.  That’s kind of like showing a series of terrorist acts, but never having a muslim doing it.  If you’re going to apply race sensitivity to anything, then it has to be applied evenly, and that means including whites in your political correctness as well.  You guys need to mix up your criminals more so your commercials are more believable.

The other thing I find irritating about these commercials are the people who own these systems.  It’s always some pansy ass who…well, I’ll get to that in a minute.  First I want to bitch about what happens.  Someone breaks into your house, and the alarm goes off.  Fine, that’s not a bad thing.  It’d actually probably scare off most home invaders, so that’s cool.  What’s not cool is that Broadview calls you to find out if you’re ok.  First of all, if someone’s in your house, the last thing you want to be doing is answering the phone so the intruder knows right where you are.  Second, if you can get to a phone, the last thing you need to be doing is talking to some schmuck in a call center.  You need to hit 911 ASAP, and you can’t do that with the Broadview schmuck tying up the line.  Sure they’ll send help for you, but it’d be faster for you to just call yourself.

Ok now to the last thing.  How come none of these idiots has a gun in the house?  I have several guns in my house, and at least one is always loaded and easily accessible.  If anyone breaks into my house, they’re in for a big mo-fuggin’ surprise, and yet these people in the commercials are always cowering in fear, worried about their kids, etc…  Hey here’s a thought.  Stop being a pussy and get yourself a damn gun so you can protect your family…ya’ damn pussy! :P

Anyway, enough of that.  Next thing…

This thing in Haiti was bad wasn’t it?  Seriously.  All those people homeless, no food, etc…  Isn’t it funny how when something like this happens, all the celebrities suddenly make it their cause celeb?  You know why?  Not because they’re good people and they want to help out, but because it makes a big show of “how wonderful and caring they are”.  Yes, in quotes.

So where were all these rich ass holes when the people of Haiti were suffering in poverty before the quake?

The other day, I heard that Madonna gave $250,000 to help the people of Haiti, because she cares so much…right?  She likes going off to Africa and adopting kids out from under their parents just she can be trendy like Angelina Jolie and adopt some kid out of some third world shit hole, just to show how awesome she is.  Reportedly, she’s worth around 613 million dollars, and all she can spare is $250k?  Wow, really caring isn’t she.  I guess she thought that’d be enough to make her look good.  Unfortunately, all it does is make her look like a cheap ass who’s just doing it for show.  Hell, with that much money, she could have donated 100 million and rebuilt the whole country if she really cared so much.  The funny thing is, a day or so after that, Sandra Bullock, who’s worth around 85 million dollars, donated 1 million to the cause.  So let’s see here, she’s worth about seven times less than Madonna but donated four times more.  And the thing about Sandra Bullock is, with her I know it’s not just a show donation.  She’s doing it because she actually feels for these people and their plight.  Too bad you can’t say that about most of the other celebs who’ve jumped on the bandwagon just to get a bit of good press for themselves.

Speaking of Haiti…

How can anyone look at what happened there and still believe in God, or have any belief that if there is a God, he’s a good and loving being?  Seriously, that’s just messed up, and some of the finest examples of brainwashing you’ll ever see.  The first thing I heard of it was right after it happened.  There was a missionary who was back here in the US, but her husband was still over there.  Apparently there are lots of missionaries over there because they like to prey on the poor and ignorant.  Anyway, she started spouting off all this shit about how she was thankful that “God was in control!” and all that crap.  Oh, so he’s in control?  That’s why there are so many people dead, homeless and enduring massive suffering huh?  If god was in control, why didn’t he stop the earthquake before it happened so these people wouldn’t have to die and suffer so horribly?  Seems pretty evil to me to allow something like that to happen if you have the power to stop it, which they believe he does since he’s all powerful.  A day or two later I heard some Navy chaplain spouting the same crap.  Then last night, I saw on the news that a whole bunch of Hatians had assembled outside a ruined church (where the archbishop had been crushed to death in the collapse) to have Sunday services.  Wait…what???  LOOK AROUND YOU PEOPLE!!!  How the hell can you people still believe in or love a God that allowed so much human suffering???  Wake the hell up already!

Then there’s Pat Robertson saying it happened because the Hatians made a deal with Satan to get rid of the French.  Don’t even get me started on that ass hole.  There’s always some religious dumb ass that spouts some crap like that after these major disasters.  It happens all the time.  Worthless bastards.

Oh, and can’t forget the shit like Hugo Chavez accusing us of using it as an excuse to invade Haiti.  Oh really?  Well, what exactly have you done to help out, huh?  Nothing?  Then shut the hell up you worthless turd.  That goes for any other crap hole country who wants to bitch about us.  When disaster strikes we’re always the first ones there and the ones doing the most, while these other whiny ass countries only provide a small percentage of the aid we do, if they provide anything at all.  So they can all just shut the hell up.  I mean jeez, our economy’s in the tank and we’re still doing way more than anyone else there.

Ok enough about Haiti.  There’s so much going on with that that irritates the hell out of me, I don’t wanna talk about it anymore.

I’m trying to think if there was anything else I wanted to talk about.  I guess not.  My life’s pretty boring really.  I’ve had a bit of a cold, but I think I’m getting over it now.  Other than that, it’s the same ol’ crap as always.  So I guess I’ll wrap it up for now.  See ya next time. :)

  (Current Mood: tiredtired)

The January 2010 issue of Rogue Cinema is now online!

January 2nd, 2010   No Comments »

Hey folks, :)

First of all, happy new year! I hope it’s a damn sight better than the last one! Anyway, here’s what we have for you this month…

Interviews:

Brooke Lemke
Chris Conlee
Daryn Tufts
Lewis Chaney and Theresa Chadwick
Mike Barbero

This Month’s Sleepover Girl:

Tara Cardinal helps us ring in the new year as our January Sleepover Girl!

Articles:

While Pete Peterson had to operate in the shadow of the grand master of stop-motion animation, Ray Harryhausen, he nevertheless managed to create some fantastic stop motion effects in a few memorable films, including The Black Scorpion. Phil Smolen doesn’t want us to forget the man, who while he never achieved great fame, still managed to produce some great stop-motion effects that still look great to this day. So read on to find out more about the great Pete Peterson, and never let his name be forgotten.

Psychotic killers on film haunt our memories. This month, independent film maker Jason S. Lockard brings us a thriller that has one of the most memorable killers of all time. Yes, it’s 1962’s Cape Fear!

Brian couldn’t resist doing a top ten list to finish up 2009. He hates those crappy lists as much as anyone, but he thought that there were ten notable films that he saw in 2009 that deserved recognition as the top indie films of the year. In fact, he was so passionate about his list, he even threw in a couple of extras!

Danny had a little too much egg nog over the holidays I think. Ok, who are we kidding, he’s a total alky! I mean, he’d have to be to come up with some of the mashups he’s come out with this month! Check ‘em out and see for yourself!

Movie Reviews:

Battle Royale
Breaking Her Will
Condemned
Dirt Bags: Evil Never Felt So Good
Drawing with Chalk
Gozu
Gun Town
I Know How Many Runs You Scored Last Summer
Pandorum
Promenade
Quiet Nights of Blood and Pain
Rooms
Sculpture
Slam-Bang
So Deep in Your Room
The 100th Job
The Chainsaw Sally Show
The Green Monster
The Local
The Lying King
The Money Trail
The Protector
The Second Best Science Fiction Movie Ever Made
The Waking Artist
Tick Tock
Welcome Home ‘The Jay Randal Story’

Book Reviews:

Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel
Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory
See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy

So head on over to Rogue Cinema (http://www.roguecinema.com) and check out all the goodness in this month’s issue.

Hope you all enjoy it!

  (Current Mood: tiredtired)

Another grab bag of stuff, since it’s been a while…

December 25th, 2009   No Comments »

I know it’s been a while since I made a post.  There are many reasons for that including my father having another heart attack,  computer problems, depression, boredom, lack of ambition, etc…

My father recently had another heart attack.  Not a regular kind of a heart attack, but one where his heart gets severely out of rhythm and it beats so fast that it can’t pump the blood properly.  He had a pacemaker with a defibrillator put in, for the second time.  The first one he had a year ago or so had to be removed when it cause a massive infection that almost killed him.  This time around, he’s doing really well, and if this thing functions as advertised, he shouldn’t have to worry about those kinds of heart problems anymore.  As soon as it gets out of rhythm, the defibrillator will hit it with some voltage and shock it back into rhythm.  The rest of the time the pacemaker part should keep it beating regularly.  I hate seeing him have to go through all this again, and this time he almost didn’t make it, but fortunately, he’s doing just fine now.

Now, on a different subject.  To all you global warming cultists out there, I’d just like you to know that it’s FREAKIN’ COLD HERE!  Like, colder than it usually is at this time of year.  Guess you wouldn’t care about that though since you’re too busy drinking your Kool Aid and preaching your climate change religion to everyone, even though the corruption and lies have been exposed for all to see and people are starting to wake up finally.

Next thing…

Second, Stargate Universe sucks massive ass.  I mean, what the HELL were they thinking taking Stargate Atlantis off the air just to replace it with that crap???  Atlantis was a great show with great characters.  Stargate Universe is more like a freakin’ soap opera.  It’s like they tried to combine Stargate with the feel of Battlestar Galactica, and it just isn’t working.  First of all, there are way too many people on that ship, and second, there’s nothing going on except for interpersonal B.S. and trying to find stuff to stay alive and keep the ship going.  Whoopie!  Where’s the enemy threat?  They’ve gone through a full half season now and they’ve encountered nothing except for some bug things on one planet and some kind of a sand whirlwind thing on another that got on the ship.  Other than that, the show’s been a total dud.  It was bad enough when the idiots canceled SG-1 to make those lame ass SG-1 movies, but then they doubled the piss off by canceling the only other good Stargate just to replace it with this crap.  LAME!

Ok, next…

My computer died.  It happened to die about a week before I had to get out this month’s issue of the magazine too, so I had to order the parts to build a whole new system and have them 2nd day shipped here so I could build myself a new computer and get it up and running in time to get the new issue of Rogue Cinema out.  Naturally it happened at a time when we’re severely broke, so if you enjoy this site or Rogue Cinema and would like to make a donation to help me cover some of the expenses of that, I’d really appreciate it…a LOT.  Here’s a link where you can make a donation.  It took half of what we had left for emergency money to get myself back up and running again so I could continue to bring Rogue Cinema to our readers with as little delay as possible, so like I said, anything any of you can donate to help out would be appreciated.

Let’s see, what else can I talk about…

It’s Christmas, and it’s been even more depressing this year because we couldn’t have a Christmas thanks to our money situation.  I did manage to scrape enough together to go buy Sharon a small present so she wouldn’t have to go with absolutely nothing, but man it’s depressing, and has only added to the depression I’ve otherwise been feeling.  If I could figure out some way to generate some kind of income it would help, but every time I try to come up with something, I come up empty.  I thought about script consulting, but there are already tons of people out there doing that, and the people I’d be doing it for generally don’t use script consultants, so that’s out.  I thought about selling sex toys again, but we have no money to get back into it.  I can’t afford to go back to school, and school never really worked all that well for me anyway.  I really have no clue what to do with my life or how to get an income coming in.  The work for PC techs dried up.  Pretty much everything out there I’m either overqualified for or have no qualifications for at all.  I don’t know what to do.

Anyway, enough of that.  I don’t need to keep sitting here bitching about how crappy my life’s going at the moment.  I’ll move on…

So when I rebuilt my computer, I installed Windows 7, 64-bit version.  I was kinda worried about going to 64-bit, but I didn’t need to be.  It’s been working pretty much flawlessly.  Windows 7, once you finish making a few tweaks to it to remove some annoyances, is a really solid operating system and a worthy successor to Windows XP, unlike Vista, which was basically a turd apparently.  The only thing that hasn’t worked as far as peripherals is my USB MIDI interface, a M-Audio Midisport 2×2, which M-Audio has been too damn incompetent or lazy to release some working drivers for.  The only other thing I couldn’t get drivers for was my old PS/2 Logitech Mouseman mouse, so I finally had to pry it out of my cold dead fingers and switch to a Logitech Laser mouse, which I’m finally starting to get used to.  Actually, the old mouse would have worked generically, but this new motherboard only has one PS/2 port, which I needed for the keyboard, so I had to switch to a USB mouse anyway.  Figured I might as well get a new one since I couldn’t get software for the old one in Windows 7.  Everything else either had drivers or worked right out of the box.  The long and the short of it is, I was up and running without a massive amount of hassle, and now that I’ve been running it for almost a month and becoming familiar with it, Windows 7 is starting to feel as comfortable as XP did.  I’d say in another few months, I’ll be totally comfortable with everything in it and won’t really miss XP at all anymore.

So what else…  Not gonna talk about politics.  I’m depressed enough and the facism, corruption and waste in our government is enough to make me wanna throw myself off a freakin’ bridge.

Man, I had a lot to catch up on when I sat down here, but I’m drawing a total blank now.  Oh, I know.  I’ve started reading all the Harry Potter books.  I just finished the third book and I’m about to start on the fourth.  I’ve always been a big fan of the movies, but I used to get really annoyed when people who had read the book would be sitting behind me in the theater saying, “That’s not how it happened in the book!” or “They left such and such out completely and changed this and that!”.  I have to say though, now that I’ve been reading the books, I fully understand why people are like that.  Aside from the first movie, which was really close to the book, the second and third movies have been so different from the books and left so much out and changed so many things, it’s like you’re watching a film written by someone who never read the book and was only told about it in general terms by someone who had.  The key points are there, but man, to really understand everything and get the full story, you really need to read the books.  I’m still a huge fan of the movies, because taken on their own, they are great movies with wonderful characters and beautiful visuals.  However, as I said, if you want the real story with the full details about everything, you really have to read the books.

Honestly, I used to read incessantly.  I would plop down with a book and literally read it all day until I finished it, even if it took me until well after midnight, I wouldn’t stop until I was done.  It taught me how to be a better writer, both grammatically and in terms of style, and it also allowed me to escape my problems and depressions for a while.  I was able to lose myself in another place.  I guess that’s why I’d lock myself into reading for such extended periods.  I didn’t want to have to go back to focusing on all the problems in my life, and losing myself in a good book was a perfect way to get away from it all.  I lost that passion for reading for a long time after I got on the internet.  I’d read something once in a while, but most of my reading and attention was focused on the net, so I really didn’t have the extra time or desire to get away from things here to lose myself in books anymore.  In the recent past, I’ve buried myself in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which, as a fan of the Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, I found particularly fascinating.  It was wonderful to actually read all of the original Sherlock Holmes stories and having the benefit of being able to imagine Basil Rathbone right in the thick of it.  For me, Basil Rathbone will always be THE definitive Sherlock Holmes.  Anyway, now I’ve been losing myself in these Harry Potter books.  I’ve actually lost a lot of sleep lately because I spend so much time at night reading them.  I’ve really missed reading, and it’s something I’m going to do a lot more of from now on.

I know I had other stuff I wanted to talk about, but I can’t remember any of it now.  It’s almost 5 a.m. and I’m finally starting to get sleepy, which sucks because we’re supposed to go out to my parent’s house for Christmas dinner today.  I’m kind of dreading that because our dog Buddy hasn’t really been socialized around other people, so I’m hoping he’ll get used to them quick and be ok with everything, but I’m not sure.  We’ll just have to see how it goes.  How he behaves will determine how long we can stay.  We have to take them with us because Missy is diabetic and needs her insulin at a certain time and since they’re both house dogs, we can’t leave them alone for extended periods because they have to be let out to go to the bathroom and such.  I wish my parents lived closer to us, but they’re an hour away, so it’s not like we could just pop back home, let them out to pee and then shoot back over.  Anyway, hopefully everything will work out ok.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I’m gonna go get a snack and watch some TV.  See ya next time.

  (Current Mood: depresseddepressed)

The December issue of Rogue Cinema has been posted!

December 5th, 2009   No Comments »

Hey folks, :)

Well after recovering from a dead computer, I finally got the December issue of the magazine out, and only a few days late! Here’s what we have for you this month…

Interviews:

Matther Saliba
Jarrod Crooks
Mike Reilly and Jonathon Kitchens


This Month’s Sleepover Girl:

Jennifer Prettyman warms up our December as this month’s Sleepover Girl


Articles:

Naama Kates brings us the third installment in her Journey of an Actress series. This time around, she talks about her struggle to get that first big break, the things she worked at in an effort to reach that point, and about how the struggle is constantly pulling her forward.

Philip Smolen did what we probably all did as kids. He stayed up late watching all those great old monster movies on television. Well this month, he’s back with another phenomenal article about some of the more memorable films that kept him up way past his bedtime.

Every holiday season new holiday films spring up like weeds, but this month, independent film maker Jason S. Lockard bring us a holiday classic that is good for both the young and the young at heart!

Gail Spencer is back with a look at some radical British drama at the British Film Institute. This time around, she clues us in on a few of the more notable single issue dramas that she came across there.

Brian may come off as a bit of a curmudgeon at times, but he really does like the holidays. Well, at least the holiday movies anyway. This month, he brings us a list of some of his favorites.

Drawing from his bottomless pit of twisted creativity, Danny Runion has created a new list of movie mashups that are so bizarre, they absolutely boggle the mind!


Movie Reviews:

The Inglorious Bastards
Mnemonica
Homesick
Between Resistance and Community
Attack of the Vegan Zombies!
Three Stooges Volume 7
Penance
Self Helpless
At All Hours of the Night
Dr. Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots
Throws of Passion
The Green Monster
Snooze
Six Grand
Young Eyes
Waffles for Virginia
[REC]
In the Folds of the Flesh
Death Race 2000
Fallen
Not Forgotten
Eviloution
Death on Swift Wings
Brainwrap
Road to Victory
The Legacy
Monsters, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas
A Broken Family
Slightly Used
VictimEYES
Splatter: Naked Blood
Snow Bunny
Sick Girl
Basement Jack


Book Reviews:

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff
Lucky Stars
Jerry Lewis Contemporary Film Directors Series
So head on over to Rogue Cinema (http://www.roguecinema.com) and check out all the goodness in this month’s issue.

Hope you all enjoy it!

  (Current Mood: happyhappy)

A grab bag of stuff that’s been going on with me…

November 21st, 2009   No Comments »

I haven’t posted for a while.  I’ve been kind of collecting stuff up so I could make a post that covered a bunch of stuff.  So…here we go.

Let’s see.  Well first, a couple of weeks ago I was knocking down the jungle that our back yard had become.  Before I get to that though, I guess I should start at the beginning.  See, I had this idea that I could burn a bunch of the dead tangle vines and such in our fire pit.  Not a bad idea really in theory, burning off your dead yard waste.  In practice however, it was a whole different story.

Picture this if you will.  I gather up a whole bunch of these dead vines, and I stick them in the pit.  Then I put a little lighter fluid on them just to really get ‘em going.  Now here’s where things kinda took a left turn, though not like you might have suspected.  It didn’t go poof and I didn’t burn off my eyebrows, though in hindsight I probably deserved it.  What actually happened was, it burned.  That was the point wasn’t it?  Well unfortunately, it also did something else.  It smoked.

Now you’re probably thinking, “Well duh, what’d you expect it to do when you lit it on fire?”

Well, you’re right.  I did expect it to smoke.  What I didn’t expect however was the billowing tower of yellow smoke that flew furiously out of the pit like the gates of hell had opened up!  I mean, we’re talking about dead, brown little thin tangle vines here.  Who the hell would possibly think they could smoke like that?  It was ridiculous the amount of smoke that was coming out of them.  Within seconds, my backyard looked like a war zone as a flood of billowing smoke filled my yard and then floated on over to the houses in the lot next to us.

Now the last thing I wanted was for some douchebag to report it as a fire or something, so I ran in the house and grabbed a spray bottle full of water, which I then used to douse the flames and reduce the amounts of smoke as much as I possibly could.  Finally I managed to get it under control, and as I stood there watching the flames die down and the smoke begin to clear, the only thing I could think was that I had never in my life had a white trash moment like that one.

Anyway, after that I took a shovel and started knocking down some of the taller weeds with stalks.  Why a shovel and not a weed eater?  Well, the level of overgrowth in our back yard was massive.  I really need to get a weed eater with a blade attachment, because our weeds just laugh at those little plastic strings.  Since I didn’t have one, and I really wanted to get started on the back yard, I just used a shovel.

After I had knocked down some weeds, I finally said screw this and went to get the lawn mower.  I plugged it in (it’s an electric mower) raised the level on it so it wouldn’t choke so bad on the weeds, and went to work.  Eventually, I had cleared maybe 90% of the back yard, but I also did something else, which I didn’t even realize at the time.  I messed up my left knee somehow.  I guess I was so pumped on adrenaline from what I was doing that I didn’t feel it at the time, but that night when I had showered and started to relax, my knee started hurting really bad.  I don’t know if I twisted it or tore something or what, but the side of my knee on the outside swelled up and got really painful.  So basically, I spent the next two weeks gimping around like an old man.  Today is the first day it’s felt 100% healed, so at least I got that goin’ for me.

Anyway, to continue my handy hubby streak, I decided that after a year and a half or more of living with no overhead lights in the kitchen, it was finally time to do something about it.  See, the florescent lighting fixtures had gone bad.  First one, then a while later, the other finally gave out.  They needed to be changed, but it didn’t seem I ever had the time or the ambition to get around to it.  Well I finally decided it was time to just do it…so I did.

First I went and bought the new fixtures.  That was simple enough since Home Depot had exactly what I needed.  So I come home and get the new ones ready to put up, and then I start to take down the first of the old ones.  Now before I get into this, I should mention that I’ve never actually done this before.  I had a pretty good idea of what I was facing though, and it was about how I thought it’d be, except for one thing.  The anchors.

See, when I unscrewed the first fixture, it turns out it was anchored in the ceiling.  There was nothing on the other side of the sheetrock.  No studs, no plywood…nothing.  So I pulled the screws out and took down the fixture and looked up there, only to find a loose anchor floating above the hole.  Now this is when I had my brain dead moment, because for some reason I had totally forgotten about the anchors I used to play with as a kid.  My father did a lot of construction, and I was with him when he built two houses, which was sheer torture for me because I was a kid and I’d have rather had been playing than hanging out around that kind of stuff.  Still, over the years, even though I wasn’t actively trying to, I actually learned quite a bit.  Unfortunately though, I had forgotten about these folding anchors that you mount on a bolt and then push through the hole so it can pop open on the other side.  I had to call my father and ask him what the hell to do, which was embarrassing, because I should have known.

Anyway, after he reminded me about the anchors, I went back over to Home Depot.  I grabbed some of the right sized anchors and I also got myself a pack of titanium drill bits and a raspy file I could use to expand the hole in the sheetrock a bit if I needed to.

Once we got back home, the first fixture went in relatively easily.  I had to drill a new hole in the sheetrock on each side because the holes in the new fixtures didn’t line up with the old ones, but other than that, almost everything went fine.  Notice I said almost…

Like a moron, I forgot to put the second end cap on the fixture, and there’s like maybe 1/4″ to 1/2″ of clearance on each end of the fixture in the recessed area they’re in, so I had to actually unscrew most of the back end and completely unscrew the end that needed the end cap, thereby losing one of the new anchors I had just bought.  Fortunately, I bought six of them, so this wasn’t that big of a deal.

So now that it’s mounted, I go to pop the light tubes in.  Something was blocking one of them, so I looked and there were these black caps in each of the fitting holes, and one of them was covering the spot where the prongs were supposed to go up.  Like an idiot, because it was out of place and blocking the hole, I assumed it was just some sort of a protective thing for shipping or something and pulled them all out.  It wasn’t until I put up the second fixture that I realized they’re supposed to actually be in there.  It just needed to be turned so that it was in the right position.  Fortunately, I didn’t mess anything up when I pulled them out, so I was able to put them back in.  Still, it was another “man I feel stupid” moment.

Obviously, the other side went up much more smoothly since we had learned exactly what needed to be done from doing the first side, but man, going up and down on those chairs only served to aggravate my knee injury and probably added days to my recovery time.  I’ve lost a lot of sleep in the past couple of weeks because of it.  I couldn’t lay down at all without the pain just radiating up and down my leg, which made it pretty much impossible to fall asleep until I had reached that wall of total exhaustion.

So I get all that done, and then the air conditioner stops working!  Great, we’re broke and now we gotta spend a couple hundred bucks or more to have the air conditioning fixed!  Before I called someone though, I decided, since I’ve been on this handy hubby kick lately, to see if I could fix it myself.  Turns out, the most likely cause is that the capacitor went bad in it.  So I opened it up and took a picture of the label on the capacitor, then I came back in and did a search for a replacement, found one for forty bucks and ordered it.  I’m going to fix it myself and save about $150 bucks!  And now for the punchline…

The capacitor is made by GE.  It seems like GE can’t make good products that last anymore.  They used to be a good company, but now they just make crap.  In the recent past, we’ve had two GE microwaves and a GE dishwasher die on us.  All were within five to six years old, if that.  Hell, one of the microwaves couldn’t have been more than two or three years old.  I have a feeling there was some other stuff from them that died on us too, but I can’t think of what it was now.  Anyway, we avoid GE products now like the plague, but I needed this part, so whatcha gonna do?

Speaking of failed parts…

A while back the video card in Sharon’s computer failed, after years of faithful service.  So I ordered myself a new EVGA Geforce 6200 (yes, the computers are older, but still good) took the card out of mine, which was a much better card than the one she had, and put it in hers, and then installed the new 6200 in mine.  My old card was a Geforce 5900 XT.  I was expecting some kind of a performance boost, but literally got almost none at all.  Not only that, that card isn’t overclockable at all, and it generally just a piece of crap.  It’s got a passive heat sink and doesn’t even use external power.  It draws it all from the AGP port.  Anyway, I’ve been really disappointed with it, so I went on E-bay yesterday and found a BFG Geforce 6800 OC (overclocked), brand new but being sold as used because it was out of the box, for $20.49 including shipping.  SCORE!  It was great timing too because the auction only had four minutes left when I found it.  So I’m going to replace that crappy card I got with this one and keep the crappy one as a spare for the server or something.

Anyway, I had more to post, but I’m hungry and Sharon wants to have breakfast, so I’ll save it for next time…

  (Current Mood: hungryhungry)

Sick bastards, corrupt government and depression…

October 29th, 2009   No Comments »

So my wife and I were at the grocery store the other night, buying what little meager food we could and we go to check out.   Honestly it was the first time I’d been out of the house in a week other than to get the mail, so I was kinda eager to get out a bit, even if it was just to the grocery store.

After we got our food, we went to check out.  Now picking which line we’re going to get in is always a deliberate process for us.  First we look at the checker to see if they look friendly and fast at their job.  Then we look at who’s in line ahead of us to see if they…

#1. …have a lot of groceries, thereby creating a long wait for us since they have to bag it all themselves, not to mention how long it takes to get checked out.

#2. …look like they’re stupid, because stupid people breed problems and hold up the parade while they try to get it worked out with the cashier, manager or whoever else has to get involved.

or

#3. …

See, there wasn’t really a number 3, until now.

So the lady at the checkout stand is running our groceries through.  Now the stands are divided with a thing down the middle and a belt on each side with two bagging areas at the end so the checker can be checking out the next person while the first one is bagging.  It’s a great system…unless you have some creepy lookin’ lady, probably in her early 60’s down at the end bagging her groceries trying to yack up what hopefully was just a giant gob of snot.  I say hopefully because my imagination could run wild with myriad of other bizarre things it could have been.  Basically though, she was sick…and out buying groceries.

Now, I’m not heartless.  Really I’m not!  I can totally understand someone being sick and having to go out to get groceries.  However…

This creepy old bat didn’t even try to cover her mouth while she was yacking…AND…she had her adult daughter with her who was helping her bag!!!

Now if you’re alone I can understand having to go out, but if you’re sick and you have an adult daughter that can go get food for you, then STAY THE HELL HOME!!!  Don’t go out and infect everyone else with your germs just because you can.  Then again, if she was so ignorant that she couldn’t even cover her mouth while she was yackin’ up that glob of whatever, then I seriously doubt she was the type of person who’d have enough class to actually care whether or not she made anyone else sick.  Still, you’d think the daughter would have made her stay home.

Anyway, if you’re sick, stay the hell home.  Don’t go spreading it around.  We have enough problems with the swine flu making the rounds, we don’t need every other sickie spreading whatever crap they have along with it.

The checkout lady was all, “Man, she might as well have just spit.”  After she was gone, the checker took some disinfectant gel and wiped down the whole area.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  The reason I haven’t written much lately has a lot to do with depression and being tired all the time.  I’m constantly sleepy lately and I don’t know why.  Not sure if its the weather or what, but man, I just can’t seem to get going.

The other thing that has me depressed is the massive corruption I see in our government.  I’m not going to get into it, because if I did I wouldn’t be able to stop.  Just remember, the people are the ones with the real power.  We don’t have to keep re-electing incumbents.  So when your next election comes around, vote for a third party candidate.  There are perfectly good and honest people running in the third parties who never have a chance because the corrupt two-party system and the media who are in their pockets lock out everyone except for those who are running in the two major parties.  It’s time to break that system and throw out the corruption that’s destroyed out government, our economy, our wallets and the system that has cost many of our brave soldiers their lives while we have a worthless president who has no problem sucking up to our enemies and the evil powers of the world and dances around at Latin music festivals while he avoids making a decision on the troop levels in Afghanistan because he wants to get every leftist wingnuts opinion on it before he decides what to do.  Meanwhile, our troops are getting killed and are unable to complete the mission they were sent there to do.  I always thought Carter was the most worthless president we’ve ever had.  Someone better send Guinness over to the White House, because in just ten months, Obama’s broken the hell out of Carter’s record for ignorance and destructiveness.  In Carter’s defense though, even though he’s a total douche bag, at least the Carter administration didn’t breed a culture of fascism, which is what’s been happening exponentially in this country ever since the last campaign.

That plus money problems and some other stuff is why I’m so depressed all the time.  I try not to let myself fall into it as deeply as I used to, but it’s really hard sometimes.

The one big joy I have right now as far as entertaining distractions are Bollywood movies.  We’ve both really gotten into them.  They’re a hell of a lot of fun, and if you don’t like the dance numbers, you can just fast forward through them.  We’ve been getting tons of them from Netflix and they’re really just…fun.  I can watch them and smile and forget about everything for a while.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I’ll try to write more often.  I just need to try to find stuff to write about that won’t irritate me or make me even more depressed.

  (Current Mood: tiredtired)

The October issue of Rogue Cinema is now online!

October 1st, 2009   No Comments »

Hey there!  It’s October, and…well, you know what that means.  No not Halloween, but we do have a treat for you.  It’s the new issue of Rogue Cinema!

Here’s what we have for you this month…

Interviews:

Eric Falardeau
Scott Voisin
Ryan Combs
Megan Franich
Robert Kurtzman


This Month’s Sleepover Girl:

Southwestern Beauty Crystal Ariana Gonzales is our October Sleepover Girl.


Articles:

After learning more and more about Naama Kates after having her as our Sleepover Girl in the September issue, I discovered that she had a really interesting story to tell, and asked her for an interview. She happily agreed (because she’s super nice), but that interview never happened. Why? Because I had a better idea. The more I thought about what she’d been through to build herself a career as an actress, the more I realized what an awesome series of articles it would make. So I asked her if she’d be interested in sharing the story of what she’s been through in a series of articles for the magazine, and fortunately for us, she loved the idea. Now in this month’s issue, we bring you the first article in that series. Just as an aside, when I asked her to do this, I didn’t realize what a phenomenal writer she was. I was highly impressed with her writing style, and after reading her first installment, I can’t wait to read the next one!

The time for horror flicks is upon us and independent film maker Jason S. Lockard is dusting off the horror vault and bringing us another classic, this time starring the most recognizable face in horror history…Mr. Vincent Price!

Philip Smolen did something a little different for us this month. Actually, it’s a lot different. We’ve never had anything like this before here in Rogue Cinema. He’s provided us with a twenty question quotes quiz, with all the quotes coming from classic sci-fi movies. Take the quiz and see how many you can recognize. Mark your answers down as you go along, because there’s a nifty little scorecard at the end!

Danny Runion has the swine flu and has become quite delirious. That’s really the only explanation I can think of for the bizarre batch of movie mashups he’s submitted for our approval this month. Either that, or he’s been eating those funny little mushrooms again.


Movie Reviews:

9
A Few Screws Loose
Addio Zio Tom
All For You
Angel Guts: Red Classroom
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Carter
Chaos In Outer Space
Criminal Woman: Killing Melody
Don’t Shoot the Pharmacist!
Evilution
Goatsucker
Mutant
Patsy
Phoenix Down
Popatopolis
Proxima
PVC-1
Salon Kitty
Scream of the Bikini
Somewhere Between Here and Now
Terrifying Girl’s High School: Lynch Law Classroom
The Afterlife with Bony Tony (Pilot Episode)
The Big Mope
The Name is Roggells (Rugg-ells)
The Welcoming
Thicker Than Water: The Vampire Diaries Part 1
Uninvited
Welcome to Dreadville III: The Lottery
Widow
Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs


Book Reviews:

Currents of Comedy on the American Screen
The American International Pictures Video Guide

So head on over to Rogue Cinema (http://www.roguecinema.com) and check out all the goodness in this month’s issue. Hope you all enjoy it!

  (Current Mood: tiredtired)

Various things…

September 24th, 2009   No Comments »

Ok. it’s been a while since my last post, so I’ll be covering various things in this one…

First, my wife’s friend knew this girl who’s basically a train wreck…and an idiot. The thing is, she has a freakin’ masters degree, and yet she makes these rambling blog posts riddled with a consistent flow of misspellings. For example, she spells the word excellent “excallant” and the word response “responce”. She’s also constantly misusing the word “then” in place of the word “than”.

The thing that irritates me the most about this is that she has a masters degree. She has a piece of paper saying that she’s smart! The sad thing is, I actually am smart, but I don’t have a piece of paper saying that, so I can’t get jobs that are as good or as lucrative as she can. How is that right? What kind of a world do we live in where a piece of paper is the be all and end all of a representation of a person’s intelligence? I know lots of morons who have degrees, and lots of really smart people who don’t. It’s not about the paper, it’s about what you know and how you utilize what you know and adapt to various problems and situations. That’s real intelligence, and it’s the foundation of common sense. Being able to memorize enough to pass a test once in a while, only to forget most of it by the time the next test comes around doesn’t make you smart, it just means you’re good at taking tests. How the hell she ever got a master’s degree spelling like that though, I have no idea. It really says a lot about the current state of our educational systems.

Ok, now on to something else…

I’ve been hearing and seeing these commercials about investing in gold for years now. They keep saying how the value of the dollar keeps dropping, but the value of gold keeps going up. Well that sounds good now doesn’t it? Hey I’ll use my worthless money to go buy this hunk of metal to secure my financial security in the future…

Now, as I see it, and I’m no financial wizard mind you, in fact, I have very little knowledge about finance and how all of that stuff works, but…

Ok, you buy gold with money. The value of the money goes down, so it’s not surprising that it would increase the amount of money it takes to buy gold. The value of the gold hasn’t really gone up all that much, if at all. It’s just that the money’s worth less, so it takes more of it to buy the same amount of gold later on.

Now, if you buy gold and suddenly it’s worth more money that has less value, what have you really gained from it? If the money is worth less but you have more of it, then you’re no better off than you were before. Add to that the fact that if the financial system fails completely, all you’re really left with are some hunks of metal that aren’t really good for much of anything except to be used to melt down for jewelry or to coat electronic parts and connectors. To the average person though, it would be worthless. Who’s going to trade food or services or anything else for a little hunk of metal when they have a family to feed? Gold in and of itself has no real value other than the value people place on it. So if the financial system collapses, you basically just bought yourself a paperweight. Even if you sell it to other countries for their currency that does actually have value, unless you’re going to move there you still have to convert it back to dollars, which will leave you in the same boat you were before.

Honestly, the best way to protect your assets is to vote out politicians who have destroyed the economy with their policies and bailouts and who’ve run the deficit through the roof to pay for pork and social programs we don’t need while pandering to unions and special interests in order to buy votes, all the while taxing us to death in every possible way they can think of. We have to elect people who are financially intelligent and who are able to make a budget and actually stick to it, like the rest of us have to, and have that budget include a good amount of money for paying down the national debt. Until we have that, the dollar will continue to devalue and we’ll all pretty much be screwed.

Next thing…

We’re going to see Def Leppard on October 24th, which pretty much drained the last of our credit but is about the only thing that’s come along in a long time now that would actually make us happy. Normally I’d be really excited about this, but something really annoying happened to me when I went to buy the tickets. We were actually able to buy them pre-sale because we’re registered on the IC tickets website. So when they came on sale I jumped on them. Section F1 is right at the front of the stage, and F2 is behind F1. So I went to buy tickets for F1, and 30 seconds after the link went live, they were sold out and all it would offer me was F2. Now this was just pre-sale, and not all the seats in the section were offered during pre-sale, but I’d like to know how someone bought up all the F1 pre-sale tickets that fast? Now, here’s the part that really pissed me off. My wife Sharon found a bunch of F1 tickets for that show available on Ebay later that morning. So basically, we couldn’t get the seats we really wanted because some ass hole scalper bought up all the good tickets and sold them at a profit on Ebay. I know scalping is illegal in some places, but it’s not here, and it really pisses me off that people do this. So I had to wait till Saturday to get the tickets, and I ended up getting them in F1 about 7 rows back from where we were last time, all because of the god damn scalpers. If I could get my hands on those bastards, I’d show them what scalping really means. I’m still really excited about seeing Def Leppard again, but this whole situation has really left a bad taste in my mouth. If the Idaho Center had any decency, they’d cancel all the tickets available on Ebay and make them available to people who really want them for themselves. Unfortunately, that would mean they’d have to actually care, which obviously they don’t.

Lastly…

I’ve been going through a lot of depression again lately. Three years of our lives have really been stolen from us and our lives have been diminished in ways I can’t even begin to explain. I’m not going to go into detail about it, but basically it’s taken a heavy, heavy toll on both of us and made everything really miserable, and it’s my fault for trusting someone and putting us in a huge financial debt I shouldn’t have. It’s really taken all the joy out of life for me, and just lately it’s really been hitting both of us hard, but especially me, because it’s really my fault for getting us into it. I really just don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried to think of ways to make money, but can’t come up with anything. My skills as a tech have waned and I can’t afford to build myself a new computer to get my skills back up to speed. My writing has gotten me nothing, and I’m not really qualified for any other kind of work, even if there were jobs available for me to go after, which there isn’t. Hell, Winco just had 250 jobs at their new distribution center open up and over five thousand people applied for them. That’s how bad the job market is. So I really just don’t know what to do. That’s why I haven’t really made any new posts in a while. It’s hard to think of stuff to talk about when I feel like this. Will things ever change? I really wonder sometimes. I’d like to think they can’t stay like this forever, but for three years now, nothing’s changed. I don’t know if it will, but I’d like to think so. Hoping for something to change and believing that it can’t stay like this forever are about the only things I have left to hold on to, but even that hope is waning. I feel horrible because my depression is causing my wife to have depression too, but I’m really just at a loss as to what to do to fix our situation, and it’s really killing me. :(

  (Current Mood: depresseddepressed)